I just tried to sign up for my bank's on-line bill payment
system, but the system complained about not being able to
verify my information, and referred me to a customer service
800 number.

So I call. And I find out that they don't have any record
of my ATM card in their system (the ATM card number and PIN
number was one of the things they used for authentication).
And the customer service rep didn't seem to believe me when
I told him that yes, this ATM card works just fine.

So in order for me to sign up, they need to send me a new
ATM card -- even though I already have a perfectly good one.
Who designs these systems? How can these big organizations
be so clueless?

I gently introduced my wife to Linux & GNOME by giving her
one of my old desktop machines to play with, and within a
few days she was bugging me to put Linux on her laptop for
her.
So as I type this, the RH7.2 installer is cranking away.

And we are now officially a Windows-free household.

Distros

I probably have not installed Red Hat since 4.x, and
I'm amazed at how far things have come. The installer that
comes with 7.2 is really nice. I can't help but
remember the first install I ever did, which was Slackware
(IIRC) back in 1993. Or maybe 1994? Anyway, it was a
long time ago, and it involved a big pile of floppy disks
that I had painstakingly downloaded.

I've been using Debian for the last several years, but I
think RH has won me back. I was a fairly loyal Red Hat user
back in
the day, but then (ironically) Havoc Pennington convinced me
of Debian's overall superiority. Isn't life peculiar?

I built GNOME2 out of CVS for the first time the other
day. I haven't played much with the gnome-core bits (in
particular, the 2.0 panel kept crashing), but I've started
looking at the part I really care about -- the development
environment.

Mostly I've played with glib/gtk+, and the new versions are
so much nicer than the old ones. I've always been
fond of gtk+, but there always were some huge annoyances
that made programming with it much more painful than was
really necessary.
I'm happy to report that the situation is now vastly
improved... the APIs clean-ups are fabulous, and I'm loving
the new tree and text widgets. Everything seems
well-thought-out, which is about the highest compliment I
can think of.

I love GObject. I didn't really realize how badly I
needed interfaces -- now that I have them, I can think of a
dozen places where they can really make a difference in my
code.

I was worried that Pango was going to make things more
complicated, but now I see how it makes everything so
much easier, at least from the developers point-of-view.
The fact that we haven't been able to do things as simple as
mixing bold, italic and 'normal' text is totally idiotic.
Now it is trivial, as it should be.

Now we just need to do something about the signal emission
overhead...

As Evolution finally makes the 1.0 mark, I've been
recovering from the final mad dash with a just-for-fun
weekend hacking project that I dropped into Gnome CVS a few
minutes ago:
GnomeChart
(CVS module 'gnome-chart') is a little app that grabs stock
data
from Yahoo! and displays it chart form using libguppi.
Give it a try! (Warning: I'll probably make another Guppi
release soon, but until then GnomeChart requires guppi3
CVS.)